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posted by martyb on Friday November 25 2016, @05:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the when-you-can-no-longer-shine-a-light? dept.

When are brilliant scientists the most brilliant? What age are you likely to be when the Nobel committee comes calling? Pick one of the following answers:

  • You need a lot of expertise and wisdom to make a big breakthrough. You need professional connections, lots of research money, and big laboratories. Scientific breakthroughs come from people in middle age, or maybe even at the end of their careers.
  • It's the young upstarts who have lots of energy and fresh ideas. After all, the old scientists are stuck in ideas from the past. They're already past their prime. They're tired and don't have much energy any more. Am I talking about myself at the ripe old age of 56? I didn't get much sleep last night, and my knees are kind of sore :)

A new study gives us the answer: None of the above. There's no relationship between age and creative scientific contribution. The authors of the study analyzed 2,856 physicists, working from 1893 to the present. They found that the best predictor of exceptional creativity is productivity. It's lots of hard work. The scientists who do the most experiments, and test the most hypotheses, are the ones with the big contributions. The researchers found that once they'd controlled for productivity, age doesn't add any additional predictive power.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:09PM (#432930)

    when you've fallen and you can't get up.

  • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 25 2016, @06:11PM (#432933)

    So a few months then? Seems kinds harsh.

  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday November 25 2016, @06:14PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday November 25 2016, @06:14PM (#432936) Homepage

    That's what Vi-agra is for.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @04:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 26 2016, @04:39AM (#433114)

    Full stop. Time for email and video games.